In November of 2010, the San Francisco Giants won their first World Series Championship in 52 years, and it was the first baseball championship for San Francisco ever. Comcast SportsNet, the television home of San Francisco Giants, enjoyed record viewership in 2010, but worried about maintaining their audience through the 2011 season when the likelihood of the Giants repeating was slim. So they asked us to come up with a low-cost promotion to help maintain ratings, drive awareness for the network, and engage fans on CSN’s website.

In the first 24 hours after we launched our promotion, Twitter mentions surged. 2 days later, CSN’s website experienced record traffic with over 40,000 unique visits (Source: CSN). Local and national press picked up the story and helped generate millions in earned media as the promotion exploded. (Source: Agency PR partner, Powell Communications). And in the end, CSN achieved a 5.47 share during broadcasts of Giants games. Our goal was only to maintain viewership. We actually helped CSN increase it by 29% during our promotional period. (Source: CSN Ratings, 7/5/11-8/25/11).

Working off the insight that baby booms historically occur after monumental events, we created the Search for The World Championship Baby — a contest that set out to find the one baby that was conceived closest to the exact moment the San Francisco Giants won the World Series. We launched with a low cost TV spot that ran on Comcast SporstNet as well as the website, urging expectant mums to enter on the registration page. We also had banners on csnbayarea.com’s homepage driving consumers to the World Championship Baby page where they could enter the contest and submit a picture.

Baseball is called, 'America’s Favourite Pastime'. Well, some would argue that lovemaking is right up there as a close second. Add in the element of competition between the mums-to-be to see who would give birth to the Championship Baby and it was no surprise that Giants fans became captivated by our promotion. In fact, more than 900 mothers-to-be who were impregnated during the World Series joined in and entered our contest.